This is literally a joke on the excellent board game “Space Alert” - someone has to wiggle a mouse every so often or everything on your Sitting Duck Class Explorer turns off.
I had movers a couple months ago and tried to tip them. Note that I don't ever carry cash and am a proponent of abolishing the Federal Reserve. I asked them for their Ethereum or Bitcoin address, and they said, "neither of us don't have that, but we take cash." I calmly tried to explain to them the evils of the Federal Reserve for around five minutes, then began to set them up with their own cryptocurrency wallets on their phones. I then plugged in my Ledger Nano S and had them each read me their public keys, which I entered into Ledger Live and sent them each their five dollar tip. It was a simple process and did not take longer than thirty minutes. By the end of the exchange, they were both very happy with the arrangement and thanked me profusely for setting them up to use the future of currency, although I was still in the process of explaining its importance.
"Teach a man to fish," they say, and I believe I did it on that day. I encourage everyone else to do the same.
Have you ever heard of "The Narcissist's Prayer"? It goes like this:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did...
You deserved it.
Tether defenders are really working their way through the steps here.
18 months ago, it was "That didn't happen." (Tether is 100% backed by USD cash.)
6 months ago, it "wasn't that bad." (It might not be 100% USD cash, but it's cash-equivalent assets like short-term commercial paper.)
Now that there's strong evidence the commercial paper is just fake money shuffling between Tether/Binfinex/other shady crypto investments we get "that's not a big deal." (Look at the way banks work! They only need 4% collateral! Tether's probably got at least that much...)
Next step is finding out that their actual liquidity isn't capable of holding up under a real-life stress test, and the defenders will be talking about "not my fault." (This was a once-in-a-lifetime crash, they couldn't have foreseen it, crypto's still way better than the fiat banking system!)
When thousands of people lose their retirements in a gigantic defi crash, it'll be "you deserved it." (Everyone knows crypto is risky, you shouldn't have believed Tether was the same as USD.)
Just a quick note... Mixed in Key is no longer necessary as both Pioneer and Serato's DJ apps include this functionality in the base, free versions.
Also, GP might want to look up the 'camelot system', which relabels keys in a simple numeric system which makes it a lot easier to determine which keys are compatible without memorizing the entire circle of fifths. Every DJ I have met or played with that keymatches labels their tracks in this fashion.
I got curious and researched the history of IM, the decline of the old networks, and the rise of the new.
Anecdotally, I got into college (in the US) right as Facebook and Gmail opened up to everyone, and my peer group created a "professional presence" of Facebook and Gmail for our college lives, slowly leaving our myspace/AIM/WLM lives with the crazy hair and skinny jeans behind. My experience was not unique; this phenomenon has been researched by others [1][2][3][4]. Soon, Facebook and Google introduced chat, and nearly everyone I wanted to talk to was on one or both of those networks.
During my research, I was surprised to learn that AIM was in fact present at the iOS appstore's launch, but I suppose there wasn't much overlap between a typical AIM user and a typical iOS user at the time.
I also found an infographic from 2014 that charts some of these dates and compares the active user counts of the IM networks over the years [5].
Here's a chronological timeline of selected milestones in the IM/social space:
2005-09 - Meebo launches offering web access to AIM, WLM, Yahoo
2006-02-07 - Google Talk integration inside Gmail goes live
2006-03 - Nielsen/Netratings survey for active users: AIM 53M, WLM 27M, Yahoo 22M
2006-07-12 - seamless interop starts between Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger
2006-09 - Facebook opens up to everyone (not just colleges)
2007-07-07 - Gmail opens up to everyone (not just invite-only)
2007-05-09 - Windows Live Messenger released for Xbox 360 (with dashboard update)
2007-12-06 - Google Talk gets limited AIM interop
2008-04 - Facebook chat goes live
2008-04-19 - Facebook overtakes Myspace in Alexa ranking
2008-07-11 - iOS App Store launches, AIM for iOS released
2008-08-26 - Facebook hits 100 million active users
2008-09-23 - Android 1.0 launches
2008-11-11 - Google Talk introduces voice and video calling
2008-12-22 - Meebo integrates with Facebook chat and Myspace IM
2009-03-31 - Skype released for iOS, Skype network has 42 million active users
2009-04-08 - Facebook hits 200 million active users
2009-06 - iOS gets push notifications
2009-09-15 - Facebook hits 300 million active users
2009-11 - WhatsApp released for iOS
2010-01 - WhatsApp released for BlackBerry
2010-02-05 - Facebook hits 400 million active users
2010-05 - WhatsApp released for Symbian
2010-05-20 - Android gets push notifications
2010-06-21 - FaceTime released with iOS 4
2010-06-21 - Windows Live Messenger released for iOS
2010-07-21 - Facebook hits 500 million active users
2010-08 - WhatsApp released for Android
2010-09-30 - Windows Live Messenger starts interop with Facebook Chat
2010-10 - Kik released
2010-12-02 - Viber released for iOS
2011-01-05 - Facebook hits 600 million active users
2011-01 - WeChat released
2011-01 - Skype for iOS introduces video calling
2011-04 - Facebook introduces voice calling
2011-05 - Viber released for Android
2011-05-30 - Facebook hits 700 million active users
2011-06 - LINE released
2011-07 - Facebook introduces video calling
2011-07 - Snapchat released for iOS
2011-09-22 - Facebook hits 800 million active users
2011-10-12 - iMessage released with iOS 5
2011-10-13 - Microsoft finishes acquiring Skype
2012-04-24 - Facebook hits 900 million active users
2012-07-11 - Meebo is acquired by Google and shut down
2012-10-29 - Snapchat released for Android
While it's tempting to accuse AIM, MSN, and Yahoo for being incompetent and not catching up to the "mobile era", they in fact did pursue this market as much as they were able. In truth, early iOS and Android were inferior platforms for a chat app. Push notifications were absent, data rates were expensive, and the average smartphone user at this time was not very likely to use those networks anyway.
Based on this info, I reason that it was truly Facebook that killed incumbent IM networks, at least in the US. Between the release of the iOS App Store and the introduction of push notifications for Android, Facebook grew by more than 300 million active users. This coincided with exodus of users from Myspace to Facebook; many of those users likely having used AIM, MSN, or Yahoo messenger in the past, now found themselves in a much larger network that also offered chat. Since Facebook largely subsumed everyone a person knew in real life, these users only had to go back to the old IM networks to chat with people they didn't know in real life, setting the stage for the weakening of connections and these networks' decline.
By 2010, Facebook, or at least awareness of it, was mainstream. At the end of 2008, the Webster's New World Dictionary named "overshare" as the word of the year [6], while in 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary chose "unfriend" [7]. For people new to the IM landscape, the old networks were dying and full of "old people" now in their 20s and 30s, so new networks surfacing around this time were appealing. This contributed to the grown of Kik and Snapchat, while people for cheaper alternatives to texting and voice calls drove the adoption of Viber, WhatsApp, and Skype. iMessage went live in late 2011, offering with FaceTime a built-in rich chat on iOS, successfully capturing an audience that would've surely gotten a third-party app otherwise. Later, Hangouts on Android emulated this strategy.
Skype is a remarkable special case. Microsoft managed to squander the popularity of MSN/WLM with its confusing product strategy, then it acquired a VOIP product that targeted a different customer base. Not content with running the two products separately, they deprecated WLM and encouraged everyone to migrate to Skype, which didn't happen. Later, they leveraged Skype as the built-in IM for their OS, while still committed to keeping it cross-platform. It could very well be a trojan-horse into the Microsoft ecosystem, but it's essentially entirely separate, completely unlike Google Hangouts.
So now we're living in a time when smartphones come with IM out of the box, nearly every social network is gaining IM functionality (Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), and the new wave of circa-2011 chat apps are diversifying into social networks (Snapchat) or platforms themselves (Kik, Viber, WeChat, LINE). You actively use more than product capable of IM, but rarely by choice and mostly by acclimation. Ironically, this situation benefits platforms the more closed they are, an intuition that's made clear by complete decline of interoperability between platforms in the past. IM is ubiquitious, leaving old "IM only" networks owned by corporations who can't figure out what they're doing (AOL, Yahoo) utterly irrelevant.
